It may not seem sensational, but the words an author uses to describe his or her book (or his or her self) from book descriptions to author bios to social media posts matters! Meta data is the key to how search engines find book information and help present it to potential readers. This an be words, phrases, and paragraphs and can be a great way to promote and market your book on the sly. Sites that sell books discover products via search engines and distribute the information that is provided by the publisher, author, or marketer. It's important to use consistent key words and descriptions within Goodreads, Amazon Author Central, and across any author blogs, websites, and social media sites you maintain.

To help connect readers, curators, reviewers, and buyers with your book, select valuable keywords and phrases that best describe your book. This could be in your ISBN listing or Amazon product listing (you can work with your publisher to refine these), as well as any web pages you manage, descriptions and bios on social media sites, and the content in your blogs and author profiles on the web.

It's a good idea to keep a master list of strategic keywords and phrases you intend to leverage across platforms. Even if you are writing an article or participating in a media interview, plugging your meta data into these venues will help reinforce your brand and help readers find your book!

Think about your potential reader and super-fan - what words and phrases would they enter into a search engine to find your book? Test this out on Amazon and Goodreads to see if they return books that are similar to yours and would attract your buyers. You can leverage Google Trends for more ideas on keywords by popularity and how often they are searched. Tip - the less popular keywords will have less competition and may allow your book to rise to the top!

Work on your list until you have a list of 10-25 words and phrases you plan to leverage every time you mention yourself or your book. Put them in order of importance, with the top 10 being those you rely on and keep in your memory (or back pocket) to pull out anytime you are posting on social media, writing a blog, or interacting on Goodreads.

But most of all, just keep it simple, make sure it reflects the brand you're looking to create, and have fun with it!

Vince Bailey’s award-winning Path of the Half Moon is a paranormal historical fiction tale set in a remote detention facility for wayward boys in the early sixties. Curtis is an African American youth whose character and physical endurance are tested by a murderous inmate and a century-old Apache curse.

Vince Bailey grew up in Central Arizona and his experiences there contribute significantly to the nostalgic aspect of his fiction writing. Path of the Half Moon is his debut novel, and Vince also pens a column for a nationally distributed trade periodical. Mr. Bailey currently resides in Peoria, Arizona with his wife, Rita. He's currently working on the next book in the Path of the Half Moon series.

About Chad A. WebsterChad Webster grew up in New York and began his love of writing in grade school. After moving to Charlotte, NC, he began his police career, which inspired his work on the Mystery Muffin & Soda Pop Slooth series. He loves people and admires how they strive for the best even in the worst situations while on the job. Chad is a husband, son, brother, and father of four.

It all started with Mystery Muffin & Soda Pop Slooth: The Legend of Mr. Creepy -- as these neighborhood detectives uncover a creepy new neighbor and his secrets, they wonder . . . could the legend really be true? Find out more in this howling good mystery.

Path of the Half Moon, also winner of the Arizona Authors' Association Literary Awards, is a paranormal historical fiction tale set in a remote detention facility for wayward boys in the early sixties. Curtis is an African American youth whose character and physical endurance are tested by a murderous inmate and a century-old Apache curse. It's available in print and e-book wherever books are sold.

Vince Bailey grew up in Central Arizona and his experiences there contribute significantly to the nostalgic aspect of his fiction writing. Path of the Half Moon is his debut novel, and Vince also pens a column for a nationally distributed trade periodical. Mr. Bailey currently resides in Peoria, Arizona with his wife, Rita. He's currently working on the next book in the Path of the Half Moon series.

We discussed earlier this year how important building your brand as an author is. Strategy, content, and social media all come into play when building your own brand. Here, we will break down some practical ways to begin building your brand and give you a step-by-step guide for getting started!

1. Who Are You?To begin, you have to figure out who you are as an author. Ask yourself, “Who am I?” When you’re answering this question, consider what you bring to the table as an author. Why are you different? Why is your book special? Why are people going to choose to support you as an author?2. Who Are You Marketing To?After you’ve figured out who you are as an author, you can figure out whom you are marketing to as an author. In other words, who is your target audience? Is it children? Young adults? Women? Men? When you figure out your target audience, you will be able to build a brand that markets directly to that audience.

3. Set Up Your PlatformWhen you’ve answered the questions of who you are as an author and who your target audience is, you can start to set up your actual author platform. First and foremost, you will need to set up your author website. For further instruction on how to best build your website, you can revisit our blog post on it.

4. Don’t Shy Away From EmailIf you think of your email list as just another way to connect with your readers, like Twitter or Facebook, it becomes much less intimidating. If you can make a great first impression with your readers and create an easy form for them to use to subscribe to your email list, building your email list is completely doable. The important thing to remember when building your email list is that you shouldn’t wait to start. Begin building the list and develop it as you go, even if your website or book aren’t quite ready.

5. Get Active on Social MediaAs we’ve mentioned in posts previously, social media is crucial to your brand. The beauty of social media is that you have the creative liberty to tailor it to exactly the way you want it. Keep in mind the Rule of Thirds that we mentioned in an earlier blog post and remember to use your social media as a way to connect with your audience. If you use it solely as a promotional tool for your book or even for yourself, your audience will not be drawn in as effectively. Keep in mind what your readers connect with about you, and use that often in your social media.

Remember to have patience with yourself as you build your brand and that, even using these practical steps, it will probably take some time. It’s okay to not get everything in order right away, as long as you are making progress!

An eclectic mix of friends, family, writers, and aspiring authors attended a friendly launch party and book signing event for Vince Bailey’s Path of the Half Moon. Held at the Changing Hands Bookstore in Phoenix, Arizona, the evening opened with a few words from the author and ended with fans and prospective readers excited for Vince’s next creation!

After addressing highly anticipated questions and peeling back the curtain with valuable insights, the attendees were able to have a meaningful discussion about the book and its themes. From the quirky point-of-view to the chronological shifts, the Q&A session helped weave together the readers’ personal observances on Path of the Half Moon.

Path of the Half Moon is currently available in print and ebook format. Learn more about Path and connect with the author here.

As part of our continuing blog series on building a strong author platform, we’d like to take a look at an important milestone – the author website. Admittedly daunting, your author website is crucial to your success as an author. It is a key piece to the communication between you and your readers. It also provides a way for readers to get to know you as an author. Your website is the first impression you will make as an author, so it is necessary to invest in a site that creates the first impression that you want to make with your readers.

Your website should effectively communicate who you are as an author, and should be aesthetically pleasing, as well.

When readers visit your site, they should know immediately what sort of books you write, why they should buy your book, and where they can buy your book. It should be clean and polished, easily navigable, and readers should be able to tell where the focus is – for example, if the focus is where they can buy your book, they should be able to easily find the button or link for purchase. Keep your colors simple, your content high quality, and make sure that your website is compatible with more than just a few browsers in order to market to your largest range of readers.

As you build your website, you should consider an About Page with an Author Bio.

Readers will want to visit this section to learn more about you, so try to preemptively tell them what they will want to know. Think of author bios that you have read in the past. What did they tell you that you enjoyed learning? What did they tell you that you didn’t care to know? What was missing? Don’t be afraid to insert humor or personal stories so that the reader feels better connected to you. In the same vein, however, don’t overdo the personal element – stay professional.

Make your page more personal by including testimonials from your readers.​​You can either ask readers for feedback on your books or use feedback you have voluntarily received from them, after asking permission to share. Not only will this give your page a more personal feel, it will build your credibility. Readers will be more inclined to buy your book when they see that others have bought it and enjoyed it.

Another element to consider adding toyour author website is a blog.

​According to Social Media Today, research has shown that websites with blogs receive 55% more traffic via Search Engine Optimization. Because of this, a blog on your author website is extremely beneficial. You can write about other books that you’ve been reading (bonus – other authors will be more likely to feature your book in their blogs!), topics that fall in your genre of writing, or just get creative!

The important thing is that you keep up with the blog, because it will generate traffic to your author website and, in turn, generate book sales and a better online community for you. And you can setup contact forms so readers can subscribe to your mailing list and get automatic updates each time you create a blog post.

Speaking of building an online community, make it easy for your website visitors to get in touch with you!

You can do this by ensuring that your email address and social media accounts are easy to find on your website. Remember that the important thing with your author website is that you build connection and loyalty with your readers. The idea is that you would capture a website visitor’s attention and turn them into a loyal reader. With all of these elements, you will have a great launching point for building your website and be well on your way to building your own author platform.

As with your social media content, you don’t have to figure this out on your own.​​You may know someone in the digital marketing world that has their own business setting up websites, or you may know a business owner that you can ask for a referral. Just ask who setup their site for them. In many cases, you can pay a designer or virtual marketing assistant to create a simple site for you that you can easily update yourself. Many great DIY site creators also allow quick setup using templates – Weebly, Wix, and GoDaddy offer these. With a little professional help you can be on your way to creating a site your fans will love.

In the next post, we'll take a step-by-step look at developing your brand as an author. Stay connected!

As part of our ongoing blog series dedicated to marketing books, we'd like to talk this week about getting social! Once you've checked out all the available social media sites (see our previous post about getting started) it's time to start connecting and building an audience. This may seem simple, but it really does begin one connection at a time - one like, one follow, one direct message. It may take a bit of time to build a following but you can start by following the authors, film makers, singers, celebrities, and sports figures that interest you. You'll get a sense of the types of content that professionals (or the pro's that manage sites for them) feel is important and will grab the attention of their followers.

The rule of three . . .According to Wikipedia and numerous pundits and internet articles and lots of books on Amazon, the rule of three is a general writing principle that groups of three are generally more satisfying and easier to remember for readers or audience members. The same can be said of social media practices.

This principle is a lot simpler than it sounds – so don’t be scared off by it! Simply think of your posts as clusters of three. For one of the posts, you will promote yourself (things like your book, business, or brand). For another, you will promote someone else (things like their book, business, or brand). For the final post, you will post something unrelated to your book or business, but still connected to you and your brand (things like a hobby, vacation, family picture, etc.). Simply rotate through these three kinds of posts! It’s so simple, but it gives you a great starting place when it comes to knowing what kind of content to create. And we follow the rule . . . with three images below!

At the end of the day, when it comes to building your brand, you have to start somewhere! Don’t let fear or intimidation keep you from beginning. Do your research ahead of time when it comes to picking your lane and finding places like conferences and online forums. Spend the time upfront setting up your social media and becoming comfortable with how it works so that, as your brand begins to take off, you can focus less on the logistics and more on building relationships with your readers and other authors.

One more thing . . .You don't have to do it alone! While it's important to make your voice and personality shine throughout your social media presences, you can get help. Take a tour through LinkedIn and search for virtual assistants. You can specify marketing assistants or social media assistants and hire someone to help build your brand, keep your sites fresh, and work with you on connecting to followers.

​When it comes to marketing yourself an author, you don’t have to wait until your book is finished and published to begin. The earlier you connect and begin to build familiarity and relationships with your readers, the better.

This becomes possible when you realize that you are marketing yourself more than you are marketing your book. At the end of the day, your name is a more important brand than your book’s title. The key is to build your own personal brand through which you can promote your books. We're launching a new blog series in 2019, dedicated to helping authors build their platforms and their brand. Here's a few things to get you started . . . maybe one or two will make it to your New Year's Resolution list!

It’s All About StrategyAs an author, you know your “lane.” In other words, you know your area of expertise. To start building your platform, you’ll have to pick your lane and start traveling down it! This can look like attending conferences, finding online forums to participate in, and even reading other authors’ stories similar to your own and reaching out to them to build community. Just like making friends in real world situations, the initial start is always uncomfortable. If you can break through that barrier, though, you’ll be able to build great relationships that will truly be able to help you along your way.​

Content Is KeyAs you are building your brand, you have to consider every element – from the colors you use to the fonts you choose to the images and logos you select. Keep in mind that each thing you post, on any platform, contributes directly to building your brand and, ultimately, selling your book. Take the time to think through how you want to present yourself.

Social MediaSocial media can be either your greatest ally or your worst enemy, and it’s easy to feel intimidated by it. To start out, take a look at all forms of social media – Goodreads, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Tumblr, Pinterest, and see what feels like a good fit for you. If you sign up, try to keep your name across these social media outlets as uniform as possible, so that it will be easier for your readers to find and follow you.

If you've already started your online social media presence through Goodreads or other online social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, connect with your followers, like some of their posts, follow celebrities, groups, or other authors that you admire. Just start making online connections, one follow at a time.

For authors with books already published, we strongly suggest creating and keeping fresh your Goodreads Profile and Amazon.com Author Central profiles. Be sure to keep them fresh with weekly posts or link them to your existing blog.

Author Chad A. Webster is featured in the premiere online 'batch' of The Biscuit, a new digital digest featuring all things Charlotte. Our author Chad, a CMPD police officer, is featured in an article highlighting the people of Charlotte and incorporates a great interview featuring Chad's two-book Mystery Muffin series.

​Chad says, "Most people are surprised that a cop would write a book for children." But we're not! Chad's in depth knowledge of the mysterious world around us plays a big part in the success of his unique storytelling.